have often used it.
Thus there is no point along the kinship continuum at which a true dividing line may be drawn between centrally ruled societies on the one hand, and ‘governmentless’ or ‘stateless’ societies on the other. It is rather that the web of kinship was spun in varying patterns and appearances. Here it might glimmer in the open sunlight of village life, or there be veiled in the awesome shades of chiefly pomp and paraphernalia. But the web of kinship was present in all these societies, the necessary underfabric of their structures.
Its influence or resilience differed greatly from people to people, and was increasingly submerged or limited wherever society became deeply stratified, or kings and nobles reinforced their power. Yet even where this happened it did so as a partial process, hesitant and still profoundly moulded by the past. The influence of the kinship structure remained powerful even in defeat.
The source of this endurance lay in the power to resolve conflict or promote common action. How much any given structure did this clearly varied, since the kinship continuum ranged from very simple forms of self-rule for very small groups, such as the thirty or forty-member Bushman ‘extended family’, to structures which enclosed large numbers of people. Obviously, too, some peoples governed themselves better than others, were luckier or more inventive. Outside influences such as Islam also played their part. But the efficacy of kinship was realised repeatedly, and above all in the ability to conserve social unity: in the capacity, that is, to counterpoise the competing claims of lineages, clans, or other segments of any given people.
It is difficult to grasp this efficacy from outside. People in modern societies think of their problems in quite other terms. Yet the difference may still be one of degree, a matter of interpretation at varying levels. Caught in litigation with a neighbour, a ‘modern’ man will think first of the immediate and practical evidence: whose trespass, whose tort? A little later he may ask other questions: how do he and I stand in relation to society? How much weight can each of us pull? And then thirdly, at another level of judgement: what kind of dispute is this, how will it be judged in relation to the moral order? These might be called the personal, corporate, and socio-moral levels. But it is only in so far as the third level, the socio-moral level, may appear of small or no real relevance in our present ‘jumble of ethical precepts’ that there exists an essential difference between present and past. Otherwise a man conflicting with his neighbour in a kinship system asks the same three types of question. What is the immediate evidence in dispute? What corporate allies can each side depend on? What are the moral issues at stake? In either case the relative efficacy of the two systems, as ways of humanising man in society, is realised at successive levels of influence on behaviour: in the nature of significant evidence, in the operation of corporate alliances, and in the persuasion of the socio-moral order.
Here I want to look at a few examples on the second level, that of corporate alliances and arrangements. They illustrate some characteristic elaborations that appeared among many peoples, though by no means among all. Age sets or age grades form one of them.
The Tiriki are a people, numbering today about 40,000, whose ‘incoming ancestors’ arrived in north-western Kenya four or five centuries ago, migrating probably from Uganda. Their community embraces groups of descent-lines owing allegiance to common ancestors. These groups live in villages or related clusters of villages near the head of Lake Nyanza. But their corporate unity, as a people, has rested chiefly on their dividing of all Tiriki males into regular sets by age. Applying the ‘ethnographic present’ for the sake of convenience, although the position today is no longer what it used to be, the Tiriki have seven of these age sets.
Suppose you are Daudi Imbadu of the Tiriki. Until you are ten or so you are counted as a ‘small boy’ with minimal social duties such as the herding of cattle. Then you will expect, with some trepidation, to undergo initiation to manhood by a process of schooling which lasts about six months and is punctuated by ritual ‘examinations’. Selected groups of boys are entered for this schooling once every four or five years. ‘Life during the six months’ seclusion period’, Sangree found, ‘is characterised by strict regimentation and a focus on group activities to the exclusion of all private or individual undertakings. All the initiates of a hut eat, sleep, sing, dance, bathe, do handicrafts etc. . . . [but] only when commanded to do so by their counsellor’, who will be a man under about twenty-five.
The accent, one sees, is on social transformation. Circumcision gives it a ritual embodiment within the first month or so, after which social training continues as before until the schooling period is complete. Then come ceremonies at which elders teach and exhort, the accent now being on obedience to rules which have been learned. The Tiriki social charter is thus explained and then enshrined at the centre of a man’s life.
‘During the many evenings in the seclusion hut and at the special ceremonial meetings in the circumcision grove [the aspirant to manhood] is taught by his counsellor and by the initiation elders the host of duties, responsibilities and privileges that accompany age-group membership.’ There is inculcated a sense of respect for elders, of brotherhood among members of the age set in question, and of skill in practical matters such as the use of arms. The parallel may be wildly remote in context and content, but one is irresistibly reminded of the English public schools. Even visiting Tiriki mums are said to be like their English counterparts, alarmed for their offspring but jealously proud of their progress.
Early in his teens Daudi Imbadu has completed this initial training in behaviour, although further training for a widened scope will continue throughout his life. Now he is judged not as an adolescent but as a young adult capable of assuming some responsibility in community affairs. How much he assumes will depend on character or circumstance. But generally it will grow with time until, some fifteen years later, Daudi and his brethren are elevated to a new set, that of warriors. This is the most admired status that any man can have in Tirikiland where, as it used to be, people have been constantly preoccupied with smallscale raiding or defence against it. These are the fifteen years during which Daudi can make his name by deeds of prowess. These will mark him out for leadership when, in the next move upwards, he moves around the age of forty into the set of elder warriors.
The elder warriors are the men who really govern Tirikiland in so far as any corporate government exists there. By this time the brethren in this set have been able to show their worth. Some take the lead; others merely enjoy the title. All are in any case expected to retire from what may be called ‘executive duties’ around fifty-five; then they become eligible for initiation into the next set, that of judicial elders ripe and wise enough to preside over courts of law. This age set of fifty-five to seventy may also be regarded as in some sense executive, since it is the next one upwards again which presides over the shrines where Tiriki laws are sanctioned and, at need, made or modified by ancestral order or advice. From about seventy to eighty-five, if he lives that long and is recognised as having the requisite qualities of character and intelligence, Daudi belongs to the chosen few whose experience and wisdom give them the final and legislative say in major Tiriki affairs. At last, near eighty-six or so, Daudi will be elevated to the ranks of very old men no longer fit for active life.
Theoretically these seven periods mark a revolving cycle of 105 years. If Daudi should survive to that age, unlikely but possible, he will have completed all stages from small-boyhood to retired eldership. In practice, of course, these arrangements have been geared to the easy-going habits of rural life, and each grade has overlapped to some extent with the grade above and the grade below. ‘This does not mean, however, that every Tiriki [has not had] a clear picture of the sorts of activities commonly regarded as most suitable for each age group during its occupancy of any given age grade.’ Even today ‘the concept of fixed progression by the age groups through successive social statuses is an openly expressed part of the way the Tiriki conceptualise their own society both past and present’.
Other peoples near and far—the neighbouring Kipsigi and Nandi of Kenya, the Bantu of southern Africa, many in western Africa—have comparable age systems. They vary in detail, as one would expect,
